by Tim Westover
Chapter Nine
They rode side by side toward Dahlonega under a splendid moon. The silver light rimed the leaves and lianas. An unseen stream and the voices of springs bubbled and sang. Nightbirds called. There was all the set-dressing of a romantic scene, and Byron himself could not have written a better—or more hackneyed—one. And the heart of a bachelor could not help but feel a little thrill at the prospect of riding beside an eligible lady, unchaperoned yet with an excellent excuse.
But Holtzclaw could not play his part in the moment. He was too oppressed by duties: the unbought land, the squandered money, the call from Shadburn that seemed to mean bad business. And there was the supposed threat of a plat-eye or some other marauder—the feeling that a marvel or wonder was about to leap from the shadows. It set him on edge and ruined his fine finish.
So instead of filling the silvery air with significant silence, Holtzclaw nattered about recent gala events held at the governor’s mansion, making special mention of ball gowns, dance forms, and musical selections. One gala had been a fund-raiser for the southern highlanders.
“The organizer made some claim about the squalid schoolhouses of the mountains,” said Holtzclaw, “and how one is as likely to find a bucketful of dung as a bucketful of coal for stoking the furnace and that snakes will come pouring out of the floor.”
“It’s poppycock,” said Abigail. It was the third time she’d used the word during their ride, and each time, it seemed to fall heavier. Holtzclaw wondered if there were such a creature as a poppycock in Auraria—that it was not merely a turn of phrase, but some kind of flowering chicken of particularly scant value. “The only time snakes will come pouring out of the floor,” she continued, “is if you build a home on top of their nest. It happens sometimes, which is why when you light the first fire in a new house, you make sure that the blankets are tucked in tight so nothing that’s woken up by the warmth will slither in. I suppose these organizers told their snake stories to make us mountain folk appear more pitiable. That’s poppycock too.”
“I’ve seen more first-rate claret here than in the restaurants of Savannah,” said Holtzclaw. This stirred a memory in him, and he described to Abigail many of the fine meals that he’d consumed over the years: various game birds, in assembled or disassembled forms, served roasted, chilled, raw, or stewed; organ meats cut thin or served as pates; turtles in broth; rare Oriental fruits served a single slice at a time from ancient porcelain. But he dedicated the most detail to a rustic meal that had been prepared for him by a troupe of Hungarian immigrants that had settled near the Alabama line. He prattled on about the meal; Holtzclaw didn’t even look to see if she was still listening, and it rather didn’t matter. Rabbits and sausages were roasted over a long open fire. A massive iron cauldron, transported with great effort into the wilderness, held a steaming goulash. Alas, the Hungarians did not stay long. The changing financial fortunes of the region, combined with political pressure relating to the manufacture of their native spirits, conspired to evict the Hungarians from their small territory. The families moved to the Ohio coal fields, leaving only a weedy cemetery with the name Budapest written in wrought iron above the gate.
“I picked up a few words in Hungarian from them,” said Holtzclaw. “Have you studied any foreign languages?”
“All the little girls in Auraria learn Chinese in between lessons in butter churning and gold panning.”
Holtzclaw waited for a moment to see if Abigail would say a word in Chinese. But when none came, he risked a brief chuckle; the moonlight on Abigail’s face revealed this to be the appropriate response.
“But I do believe that gold panning is part of your universal education here,” said Holtzclaw. “In my travels today, I met a young woman who was as practiced as any grizzled prospector.”
“Who was that?” said Abigail.
“Ms. Rathbun. In the old capital, that sort of woman would only know about gold in its final, highest form—the cufflinks of a lover or the necklace of a rival.”
Abigail’s face soured. “A lazy woman like her would only care about gold if it helped her judge people. Who’s worth her time, who’s not. Are cufflinks and necklaces really the highest form of gold?”
“That’s unfair,” said Holtzclaw. “I think her opinion is closer to the general one, and it has great merit. When men and women dream, do they dream of simply sitting upon piles of gold? No, they dream of what they’d buy. Fashionable clothing, a spread of land, fine cuisine, a life of leisure. They dream of using gold, not finding gold.”
“Those are dreams of rich idlers. In Auraria, we are miners, even in our dreams. When I’m asleep, I follow the hillside that leads up from the Five Forks Creek, and in Fowler’s Gully is a loose boulder, and underneath the boulder is an iron pot in which are buried fifty gold double eagles. Or I wade into Painter’s Creek until I step in an eddy, where there is a golden head with pearls for eyes and an emerald set in for a tongue. Or I’m following a tunnel that leads to an open cavern with a village of stone houses and a palace over them, gathered underneath a stone sky. I descend a staircase that falls straight down into the mountain and ends at an underground sea, and there is gold piled there in drifts, as though the river carried it down like waste. And when I press my fingers against the warm metal, I wake up.”
Perhaps Auraria could inspire prophetic dreams, or perhaps if one dreamed often enough in a place as rich as the Lost Creek Valley, then one of those dreams was bound to come true. “And do you then set out with your pick and shovel?” said Holtzclaw.
“I’ve never had the need,” said Abigail.
“We are very different people, Ms. Thompson.” Ms. Rathbun would have been digging at once, thought Holtzclaw—as would he.
•
A mile past midnight, when they were still not out of the Lost Creek Valley, Holtzclaw asked Abigail if they could stop for a drink. She nodded. They were following a road that paralleled the course of a running river; Holtzclaw could hear the flow somewhere in the darkness below. But they rode for several minutes before Abigail brought her horse to a stop.
“Here it’s easy enough to get down to the water,” she said. They left the horses on the road hitched to a post. A path led down to the water, and as they descended, Holtzclaw was surprised to find the path transformed into rough-hewn steps. The farther they descended, the colder the air became.
The path ended at a waist-high wall, likely the remnants of a millrace, and just on the other side of the wall was the river. Holtzclaw leaned over and found that the far side was rimed with frost. The wind was laden with ice, and when Holtzclaw put his cupped hands into the flow, they shivered. He tried to sip the water, but his lips recoiled.
A flickering silver light made him look to a bend upriver.
“Oh, I didn’t think they’d be out tonight,” said Abigail.
“Who is that?”
“We call them moon maidens, but I don’t know if they have their own name for themselves.”
Holtzclaw’s mind raced. The first time he’d encountered these creatures, he’d seen only shadows. Now he was in stronger spirits, with more of his wits about him, and he had been prepared by two days spent among the strange sights of the valley. He needed to know what sort of people commanded the service of Princess Trahlyta—terrestrial or supernatural. He needed to know how much to concern himself with this enigmatic girl, should she try to oppose him.
“I need to see these moon maidens,” said Holtzclaw. “Can I see them?”
Had Abigail offered an excuse why Holtzclaw shouldn’t seek the moon maidens, this would have been its own proof. Instead, she said, “Go ahead, if you want. Try to be quiet, or you’ll frighten them away. Pretend that they are some gentle animal at a spring.”
Holtzclaw could not find a clear path leading upstream. The bank was overgrown with bracken. His progress up the river was slow; he broke twigs underfoot, pushed leafy branches from his path, and navigated around a thorny laurel bush until he cleared the be
nd.
Five women bathed in the middle of the ice-cold stream. They were clad in blue fabric; the thin garments would not protect against the cold. Two of the bathers were stretched supine on the rocks, letting the crystalline water flow over their shoulders. Three others waded in a waist-deep pool, cavorting and splashing. Their skin was pale, and their long straight hair was white or silver.
Holtzclaw huddled against the wall, stealing a peek at his quarries. Now he was just twenty feet from the moon maidens, and he could see their faces. All had small noses that ended in an upward turn; their ears were long and folded at the top.
One of the cavorting maidens dove below the water’s surface and reemerged at a rocky pool just a few feet away. She turned toward the wall where Holtzclaw was hiding and made a call that was halfway between a bird whistle and a mammal’s rooting. Her companions froze and fell silent. The only sound was the moon maiden’s sniffling and the cracking of ice. She ran her nose along the river side of the wall; the elongated tips of her ears were alert and anxious. Holtzclaw could not hope to flee, so he pressed himself against his own side of the wall, hoping the cold would confuse his scent.
The moon maiden was not fooled. She leapt onto the wall and leaned over, upside down, just above Holtzclaw, her face inches from his. She had no color in her eyes; they were black from edge to edge. The expression on her face was alien and inscrutable.
Then she vanished so quickly that the air snapped and quivered. Holtzclaw sprang up from behind the wall to see the soles of feet patter across the slick boulders of the river and then disappear into the underbrush.
Already, the air felt milder, and starlight flickered on the face of the water. The peculiar influence of cold and light was broken, slipping away like a sweet memory. Nothing else was like them in this sublunary world.
•
With the moon maidens gone, the place was an ordinary stream. Holtzclaw picked his way back through the underbrush, and when he stumbled back to the base of the wide staircase, he saw Abigail in conversation with Princess Trahlyta. They stopped when Holtzclaw neared. Abigail was playing with a small rock between her fingers, twirling it up and down across her knuckles.
“Hello, James,” said the princess. “What do you think of our valley now?”
“Blizzards and haunted pianos are a poor way to introduce it,” said Holtzclaw. “You should start with something spectacular and unequivocal, like your moon maidens.”
“I did,” said Trahlyta. “You saw them even before you got to town. But they didn’t make an impression.”
It had been foolish, thought Holtzclaw, to have remained unmoved. He had tried to explain the maidens, their cold, their flight, as weather or fleetness or even—as if this mattered in the moonlit valley—a lapse in decorum. How much more progress would he have made if he hadn’t clung on to his stubborn reason? It was irrational to persist in rationality as long as he had. It had caused him to misappraise his task—and misappraise his rival.
“Are there many of these maidens or only the five that I saw?”
“They take their holidays in smaller numbers now, as is the fashion,” said Trahlyta. “Still, they keep me busy. They demand excellent streams, piping springs, comfort and company.”
“Company? What do they have to say?”
“We talk about the weather, mostly, and shaking off the lunar chill. It’s always warmer here than on the moon.”
“All tourists talk about the same things,” said Abigail. She cast away the rock that she’d been twirling. Holtzclaw saw it glitter in the starlight before it ricocheted off a boulder and sank beyond his sight.
“Was that gold?” said Holtzclaw, the moon maidens all but forgotten. “Did you throw away a nugget of gold?”
“It was a rock,” said Abigail. “Gold is a rock.”
Holtzclaw turned to the princess, but she was fixated on a moonbeam reflecting from a puddle and had lost interest in earthly matters. He unlaced his boots and removed his traveling coat, then stepped into the rush of the river. The water was still bitterly cold, but he ignored the discomfort. He had splashed out to the point in the river where he’d seen Abigail’s discarded stone fall. The riverbed was pocked with deep holes and crevices that had been scoured by the course of the river. He plunged his arm into one of the deep holes, but his hand did not touch the bottom. In another, he found a slimy flank of some aquatic creature. It nipped at his fingers, and he recoiled.
“It’s gone, isn’t it?” said Holtzclaw. “The nugget?”
“No, it’s not gone” said Abigail. “But you can’t get it. It’s too deep. Perhaps you’ll stub your toe against an even bigger find down the road. Come out of there, and let’s move on.”
“Will you help me find it?” said Holtzclaw. “It could mean great fortune for both of us.”
“You need to get to Dahlonega, and I need to be back before the chickens want feeding.”
He protested to no avail, until a sharp wind shook him from his revelry. If he still wished to be employed in the morning, then he must meet Shadburn, as summoned.
The princess did not wish them goodbye. She studied the advancing path of moonlight against the earth. Of all the wonders Holtzclaw had seen so far, the most perplexing was a nugget of gold, carelessly tossed into a stream, and two poor souls who did not care a whit.
•
Holtzclaw and Abigail rode on. He was uncomfortable in his wet clothes. The night air was still cold, though its lunar inhabitants had fled.
“How long have you known the princess?” said Holtzclaw, controlling his jaw against a reflexive shiver.
“We used to play together,” said Abigail, “when we were small. When I was small. We’d play Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine, or mermaid, or sometimes washer-woman, but Trahlyta didn’t think that one was very fun.”
“I don’t think she likes me.”
“She didn’t even mention you.”
Holtzclaw found this hard to believe.
“We were trying to remember all the rules of our mermaid game,” continued Abigail. “How long you had to hold your breath, how many rocks you had to bring up, what colors counted for how many points. It was a very complicated game.”
“Did you get more points for nuggets of gold?”
“That would make the game too easy.”
Holtzclaw drew up his horse. “Abigail, this isn’t some joke that you play on foreigners? A fish you dangle in the mist to bait them?”
Abigail seemed puzzled by his turn of phrase. “Why would I?”
“To disrupt my employer’s mission.”
“Why would I care about scrap metal?”
Holtzclaw shook his head. “It’s not scrap metal. I don’t know what it is.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said. “I couldn’t see the profit in scrap metal.”
The moon was no longer overhead—it had vanished behind the steep walls of the valley. The silvery tinge on the trees was gone. Leaves rustled in the darkness. Abigail pulled the reins of her horse, drawing him to a sudden stop.
“He’s abroad. We might have avoided him if he were in his hollow or hunting on the other side of the ridge.”
“The plat-eye?” asked Holtzclaw. Abigail nodded. “Do we flee, then? Do we fire at him? I didn’t bring a rifle, but I think I could make a speedy break.”
“None of those would do any good. Listen, if he sees your head, he’ll try to take it. Because he doesn’t know you. Because he’s in a place of bad memories. So he mustn’t see your head.”
Abigail instructed Holtzclaw to undo his overcoat. She pulled it up by the lapels so that the collar now surrounded the crown of his head, and then she fastened the top button against Holtzclaw’s forehead. She left the third button undone, which provided a window through which Holtzclaw could peer with a single eye. He was forced to hunch his shoulders to his ears, and his arms could not hang in their natural position.
“Don’t say anything, and for your own sake, don’t show your nose.”
She tied his horse to hers, and the train staggered up the road for a few paces.
Holtzclaw heard a swirling noise, then a voice that a dozen years ago could have been pleasant but was now inflected by the wheeze of decay.
“Why, it’s Abby Thompson!” said a voice. “I’d tip my hat to you, little miss, but … aha!”
Holtzclaw turned his bound torso and caught sight of the speaker. Muddy boots, spattered trousers, a hatchet held across his chest, and above the shoulders—nothing. Where his neck should be was a smooth place, unmarked by gore or scars. It didn’t look like he was missing a head, but rather that he had never had one at all. Holtzclaw had never met a headless man before; it was disconcerting to him. But he had never climbed the stairs of an infinite house before, nor found a blizzard blowing from a springhouse. Then Holtzclaw remembered that he himself, buttoned up inside his jacket, would look headless to the rest of the world. He’d joined the ranks of the fantastic.
“Hello, Hulen,” said Abigail. “How’s the hunting?”
“Oh, I cannot complain … got no mouth! Aha! Tavern business treating you well? How’s your father?”
“Still dead,” said Abigail.
“That’s right,” said Hulen. “I keep forgetting. Just slips out of my mind … aha! Such a nice place, the Old Rock Falls. Do you think I could come for a drink? For old time’s sake?”
“It would be splendid, Hulen. Mr. Bad Thing would be thrilled. But you’d have to promise not to tear off any heads.”
“Who’s your friend there?”
“Traveling salesman of some kind. Came down from Dahlonega yesterday and now he’s heading back. Tight schedule, so we’re traveling at night.”
“He’s got no head, either?”
“No, no head.”
“Poor fellow. It’s not an easy life. I’d cry all day about it …”
“But you’ve got no eyes?” said Abigail.
“Whose head is he trying to take?”
“No one’s.”
“And he was at the Old Rock Falls?”
“Had dinner and supper there.”
“If some traveling salesman can do it, then old Hulen can do it. Say, do you have any of that Sour Mountain whiskey? That was always my favorite.”
“It wouldn’t be, any more. Old Joe went out west. His brother took over the still, and it doesn’t run as sweet for him. We have Blood Mountain whiskey now. Almost the same, but not quite.”
Hulen muttered a series of nonsense oaths.
“You’re not the only one, Hulen. Nobody likes the change, but it was forced upon us.”
“How about Cold Valley?”
“Plenty of that.”
“Mix it with Porter Springs mineral water, put it over a stone of the Sky Pilot’s ice—that was fine drinking. Fire down your gullet! Of course, I don’t have a gullet … aha …”
“Doesn’t matter, Hulen.”
“No no, I suppose it doesn’t.” Hulen had no chin to rub, no head to scratch, but Holtzclaw detected the same sentiments in his posture. “Well, you’d best be careful, Abby. There’s ghosts out, you know. Headless ghosts. I’ve seen ’em with my own two eyes … aha!” Hulen made a bow from the waist and turned back into the wilderness. Abigail waved goodbye.
The linked horses stumbled forward for a quarter mile; then Abigail at last permitted Holtzclaw to unbutton himself from his high collar and resume control of his own mount.
“That was not as terrifying an experience as you made it out to be,” said Holtzclaw.
“You were with me, not alone,” said Abigail. “But it did go very well. I don’t think Hulen expected to meet another headless horseman.”
“Why do you call him a plat-eye if he doesn’t have any eyes at all? Aha!” said Holtzclaw.
“Don’t you start.”
“Would he have tried to take my head off, like you said?”
“He wants a head so badly. He’s shown me other heads that he’s tried, and they don’t look right. I’ve told him an animal head might be more suitable, but he hasn’t been able to kill one big enough. Once he came out of the woods wearing a squirrel head, and it was all I could do not to laugh.”
“You’d trust him to come back to your tavern, given his head-collecting proclivities?”
“We don’t allow that sort of behavior at the Old Rock Falls, and he wouldn’t desecrate the place.”
“Why doesn’t he try to take your head?”
“I like ghosts,” said Abigail. “And I’m a face from his happier life.”
“And if I liked ghosts, he wouldn’t try to kill me?”
“I don’t think you could make friends with a spirit. Just see how you treated Mr. Bad Thing. Most people can’t leave behind the ghost stories and come to know the ghosts.”
Chastened, Holtzclaw fell silent for a few moments. He brooded, then could not hold back. “How does he speak if he has no head?” he asked.
“How does he eat or drink or see or breathe?” said Abigail.
“It isn’t natural.”
“It’s perfectly natural for a ghost.”